Cradle Royale

Double-0 heaven! Many congratulations are in order. Rachel Weisz, the wife of 50-year old James Bond star Daniel Craig, has announced that she is expecting a baby with her husband.

Rachel revealed that she is pregnant at the age of 48, and the couple are said to be ‘thrilled’ to have a ‘little human’ on the way.

Speaking of her pregnancy, Rachel said: ‘I’ll be showing soon. Daniel and I are so happy. We’re going to have a little human. We can’t wait to meet him or her. It’s all such a mystery’.

The devoted couple were most recently photographed in public at a special gala event in New York on April 9th, the city where they spend much of their time when not filming. As many James Bond fans know, Daniel and Rachel started dating in December, 2010, and married in New York in June, 2011.

Craig is Weisz’s first husband, and she has previously said that she had no desire to get married until she met the James Bond star. The couple’s relationship is usually kept very much from the media limelight where possible, and Rachel commented in the new interview (given to the New York Times): ‘It’s very personal. It’s very private. I don’t think mine’s particularly exceptional apart from that we’re both in the public eye. But I never thought I would get married. It was not an ambition of mine. It was the opposite’.

The award-winning actress also reflected: ‘I couldn’t relate to romantic comedies – marriage seems to be the whole point of them. Then it just happened, happily, at a more mature moment’. Craig is already a father to daughter Ella, who is 25, while Weisz has an 11-year old son from her previous relationship with director Darren Aronofsky, who she was with between 2001 and 2010.

007 and Counting…

As Daniel gears up for his next James Bond movie, which is officially planned to commence filming later this year (possibly helmed by director Danny Boyle), and the world speculates as to how the 007 star will approach his interpretation of Bond for the fifth time, his wife Rachel has commented in recent weeks on the character originally created by author Ian Fleming. As the JBIFC noted in February, in a separate interview given to the UK’s Daily Telegraph earlier that month, Weisz praised the Bond creator and strongly argued aganist the idea of having a female Bond to replace her husband when he eventually hands in his licence to kill.

Weisz said she did not believe a woman should take over from Daniel, but females should instead ‘get their own stories’. Her views echoed comments by former ‘M’ actress Dame Judi Dench, who has also firmly rejected the idea of a female 007. Significantly, former Die Another Day Bond woman Rosamund Pike has also joined the debate and dismissed the idea that 007 should be a woman.

Speaking to the ‘Londoner’ showbiz column of the London free newspaper the Evening Standard (April 13th), Rosamund (who played double-crossing agent Miranda Frost in Pierce Brosnan’s final 007 adventure) said: ‘The character of James Bond is a man. Why should a woman get sloppy seconds? Why should she once have been a man and now it is to be played by a woman? There is nothing really about the James Bond written by Ian Fleming that resembles a woman. It’s a very masculine creation’. Instead, Pike suggested, ‘Take one of the Bond girls and give her her own story. So create an unexpected, unapologetic, kick-ass female agent and yes, I’ll play her!’

Interestingly, the question of the role of women in the James Bond series might be approached from a very different angle in movie no. 25: the latest (unconfirmed) rumour is that the proposed script being worked on by Danny Boyle’s writing partner John Hodge will feature a female villain at the heart of the story.